Drupal for Mobile: Building responsive websites with Drupal
The surge in the use of mobile devices and the ease of accessing the Internet through various devices such as tablets, smartphones and smartwatches (rather than the traditional desktop and laptops) have changed the way websites are being built and accessed.
The key advantages of web on mobiles as opposed to a laptop/desktop are:
- Ease to carry around-handy; not at all bulky.
- Ease of access- anywhere, anytime especially for a short duration.
- No time delay in powering on.
- Multiple use
- Touch screen
- Geolocation
Luke Wroblewski revolutionized the thought process behind website designing with the introduction of his book and strategy by the name “Mobile First”. He argued that building a website first for a smaller screen and “progressively enhancing” it to a desktop version increased focus on core content and functionality. It encouraged creativity due to constraints in smaller bandwidth, screen size and need for performance speed.
Ethan Marcotte introduced Responsive Web Designing (RWD), a concept of adapting a website’s layout for multiple screen resolutions.
On April 2015, the Google webmaster Central Blog stated that they have started using the mobile friendliness of a website as a ranking signal for Google search results/SERP (Search engine result pages).Google has even brought out a mobile friendliness test tool to analyse the URL and check on the page's mobile–friendly design. You can surely get an edge over your competitors by having a mobile-friendly Drupal website.
With Drupal, developers have multiple options in how best to deliver a mobile experience, either by extending the capabilities of a website to a mobile browser, or by linking a native mobile application directly using web services. With native mobile application, you can also avail numerous advantages such as:
- Access to the device’s camera for images or video.
- In app advertising from native mobile app networks
- Access to the device’s file system for caching
- Access to the device’s contacts
- Native map functionality
- Device’s accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and map
Drupal is a great platform for delivering content to devices of all sizes and capabilities, by integrating with a CDN (Content Delivery Network.). A CDN reduces the time delay between the end user and the server that serves files referenced by the HTML, such as CSS, images and fonts. The CDN achieves this by hosting and serving the content on servers that are often geographically closer to the user. Drupal can also be used as the backend for mobile application development. By using the Services module, your app can be the front end that talks to Drupal which would contain your content, business logic, user management and search functionality.
Zyxware Technologies, one of the leading Drupal solutions providers in the country, has a comprehensive IT knowledge base that can be explored and taken advantage of so as to enhance the exposure and accessibility of your website in all the available devices. So, if you wish to transform your non-responsive Drupal website into an interactive one, we are here to help you. We have been providing customized
Drupal development services to companies across the globe, in different industry verticals, for close to a decade. Please contact us to learn more about our services.
